Reprocessing of automobile bodies is important to the public interest because scrapped automobile bodies can supply a very substantial amount of steel which can be reused in the automobile and other steel industries. In addition, reprocessing is essential in order to prevent filling up the landscapes with the visual blight of steel scrap piles.
Because the profit potential for reprocessing of scrap steel is marginal, the automobile bodies and similar types of used materials must be very quickly and efficiently handled at the lowest possible cost.
The scrap iron industry has learned to crush automobile bodies and form them into compact bales, and to shred the automobile bodies into small pieces so that they may be more compactly stored and efficiently handled during the reprocessing procedures.
Automobile tires have continued to be a problem for the reprocessing industry because the rubber material in the tires constitutes a significant contaminant in the processing steps for the scrap steel. Accordingly, the tires from scrapped automobile bodies must be removed and otherwise handled.
In the past, no highly efficient method or apparatus has been devised for removing the tires from the automobile wheels, and, as a result, the common practice has been to remove the wheels from the automobile body and to discard the steel wheels together with the rubber tires because the tires have proven to be rather difficult to remove from the wheels. An excessive amount of hand labor has been required in order to remove the tires and, as a result, the scrap steel which is contained in the automobile wheels has been essentially lost.